


Why Shouldn't the Guy Let Off a Little Steam?

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: October 2020 Prompts [17]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Arguing, Avengers Tower, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, M/M, One Shot, POV Third Person, Post-Iron Man 3, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Protective Steve Rogers, Protective Tony Stark, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:07:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27061669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: Bruce and Tony never fought.Never.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Tony Stark
Series: October 2020 Prompts [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947679
Comments: 10
Kudos: 86





	Why Shouldn't the Guy Let Off a Little Steam?

**Author's Note:**

> Day 17, for the prompt "dirty secret"

Steve had barely stepped out of the elevator onto one of the top floors of Avengers Tower when he heard the muffled voices from upstairs. That in itself wasn’t unusual; when he lived in a tower with five other people, there wasn’t really a lot of  _ quiet _ . Especially when those other people consisted of a Norse god, a man who could become a giant rage monster, two assassins, and Tony Stark. 

No, the unusual part was that the voices seemed to be shouting.

Steve frowned, shrugging his jacket off and setting it onto the back of a chair, looking up at the ceiling as though he could see through it if he tried hard enough. The team might’ve had a bit of a… rocky start after their first meeting on the helicarrier, but defeating Loki had turned out to really bring them together—as much as a group like them could ever really be brought together—and the amount of serious arguments had dropped off considerably. And this one wasn’t coming from any of the places he would’ve expected, either; both the training room (which was designed with Stark Industries money and therefore had enough space to fit about three times the number of people it currently did, but, hey, sometimes accidents happened) and the main deck were on the levels below this one.

Actually, the level right above this one was the lab.

And there were only two Avengers who really used the lab.

Steve stared at the ceiling for another moment, listening to the continued shouts (even with serum-enhanced hearing, he couldn’t make out what they were saying) before he hurried over to the stairs.

As he climbed them two at a time, his thoughts wandered onto the absurd unlikeliness of this situation. Out of everyone in the Tower, they were the  _ last  _ two he’d expect to be arguing at all, let alone loud enough to hear it from the floor below. Yeah, everyone was used to him and Tony going at it, and sometimes Natasha wasn’t the calm mediator some people seemed to expect, and Thor never hesitated to put in his opinion during a mission, and it was inevitable that everyone had a reason to yell at Clint once in a while, but… Tony and  _ Bruce?  _ That had legitimately never happened, not when Steve was around, anyway.

_ And for a pretty damn good reason. _

Steve reached the top of the stairs and headed down the hallway to the lab door, pausing with his hand hovering in front of it. The voices were even louder from this close, but the exact words were still indecipherable.

Then he remembered one way he could find out. “JARVIS?”

The AI responded immediately from whatever hidden speaker was in this hallway. “Yes, Captain Rogers?”

“Um. What’s going on in there?”

There was a pause that took just slightly too long, and then JARVIS said, “Mr Stark and Doctor Banner are having a conflict of ideas. However, I do not believe it is anything they cannot settle on their own.”

As Steve listened, there came the sound of someone slamming something down on a table from the other side of the door. “Yeah, I’m not so sure about that.”

He opened the door and stepped inside. The lab, as always, was wide open and full of technological activity: lines scrolling down screens and several holograms of something or other flickering in the corner.

No one was paying attention to any of that at the moment, however, because the only two scientists in the room were a little preoccupied with shouting at each other across a table.

“—and it’s not like there’s anything we can do about it now, anyway! I deleted it, it’s gone, it’s done.” Tony rapped on the table to punctuate the last sentence. He was leaning on the edge of it, looking across and into Bruce’s eyes.

Bruce, in contrast, was staring off somewhere on the other side of the room, his lab coat looking incongruous next to Tony’s AC/DC T-shirt. “Not all of it was yours to delete, Tony.”

“It was a  _ commitment _ .” Tony’s hands moved up in the air before returning to the table. “Besides, you should really be happy about this, given that—in case you forgot—those weapons were  _ supposed to kill you. _ ”

“They were necessary precautions,” Bruce muttered. He turned away.

Tony let out a breath. “Stop that. Stop talking like that; you know what you’re doing is manipulating me, right?” Bruce pulled his glasses off and started fiddling with them, and Tony apparently took that as encouragement to keep going. “You know I hate it when you talk like that and you know I didn’t know at the time—”

“What you knew at the time were the facts.” Bruce’s voice was measured now, but there was still the undercurrent of tension running through it. 

“There was a  _ pretty  _ big ‘fact’ left out!”

“What, the fact that now you have an emotional attachment and you’re incapable of looking at this objectively anymore?”

“The fact that you’re a fucking human being!”

“That isn’t the point! The point was that those weapons were supposed to protect  _ other  _ human beings, and you just up and—”

“If you want them so bad, go and talk to Ross,” Tony shot back. “I’m sure he’s got some lying around.”

Bruce’s face twisted and he went quiet for a second. “First of all, that was a low blow and you know it.” Tony started to interject but Bruce lifted his hand, finally making eye contact. “Second, I don’t understand how you can… can make all these safety measures in the Tower, with JARVIS and the team and—god’s sake there are Post-Its for Hulk protocols on the  _ refrigerator _ —and yet you insist that there isn’t a danger in—”

“A danger in letting you  _ live your life— _ ”

“A danger in—yes! Basically!”

“Bruce.” Tony slid around the edge of the table so that he was on Bruce’s side, taking a step closer when Bruce backed up in response. “Bruce Banner. I will  _ happily _ design you all the safety measures in the  _ world _ if that’s what makes you feel better, but there is a  _ line,  _ and I draw the line at killing you!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t!”

By this point, Bruce had abandoned trying to keep his voice calm and had stepped closer to Tony, who of course hadn’t backed down. Their faces were inches away from each other and both of them were shouting again.

Steve had been frozen in the doorway, watching the scene play out, but now he let the door slam shut behind him and yelled, “HEY.”

Both Bruce and Tony blinked and instinctively stepped away from each other, turning in the direction of his voice.

Steve walked further inside the lab and stopped a few feet away from their table. “Maybe you two need to calm down.” He couldn’t help but shoot a meaningful look at Bruce, who instantly took another step backward, his hands coming away from his sides to fidget over each other.

Tony glanced back and forth between him and Steve. “Hey, Cap, not that I don’t appreciate you and everything, but this is a really bad fucking time.”

Steve chose to ignore that, also choosing to bite down on the remark that  _ yeah, it’ll  _ be _ a really bad fucking time if you guys keep going the way you were going _ and saying instead, “Tony, I don’t understand how you could be so irresponsible.”

“Excuse me?” Tony’s eyes went wide. “ _ You’re _ lecturing me about responsibility? JARVIS, you better be recording—”

“Could you not turn this around for five seconds—”

“It’s fine, Steve,” Bruce interrupted. Already his voice was quieter, and he was holding out his hands in a placating gesture. “I’ve got it under control.”

And it did look like that was the case; Bruce was standing perfectly still, and there was no hint of green creeping up the spot where his arms left his sleeves. If Steve had been an outside observer, he’d have assumed that  _ himself  _ and Tony had been the ones in the drag-out fight, but he also knew Bruce, and he could tell when his teammate wasn’t as calm-waters as he pretended to be. So all things considered, he thought he was a little justified in his concern.

And then Tony started off again. “No, no, it’s not fine.” He was talking to Steve, but he kept pointing to Bruce. “Look at him. Does he look like he’s gonna go green to you? No, and you know how I know that because I have tried to piss him off on purpose so many times I’m running out of pointy objects. We were having an  _ argument. _ People do that, sometimes. You happen to be an expert in that particular field.” He was almost pacing now, taking a few steps here and there until he was back on the other side of the table almost without realizing. “My entire  _ point _ was that he’s not a bomb about to go off.”

Bruce made a face, but either Tony didn’t notice it or he chose not to comment.

_ He definitely didn’t notice it. _

“Look, that’s not what I was trying to say,” Steve said. “I just wanted to make sure the Tower is still going to be standing when the rest of the team gets back.”

“Yeah, well, no one asked you.” Tony muttered that to the tabletop, but from the way his eyes darted up, he clearly knew the others could hear him.

Bruce sighed. “Tony, could you stop biting his head off? Steve didn’t do anything.” He turned to Steve again and started to explain. “You know how, before Iron Man, Stark Industries was a weapons manufacturing company?”

Steve nodded. That had been in the files S.H.I.E.L.D. had given him when he first defrosted: the World War II victory, a brief rundown of the major events of the seventy years following, and what had happened to Peggy, the Commandos—and Howard Stark.

“There were some old designs—data, prototypes, a whole pile of stuff—that were originally contracted by the US army for a… very specific purpose.” Bruce paused before evidently deciding that that needed further clarification. “Ross—you know who—”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Ross used some of them when he—when I was on the run, and they might not’ve done their intended purpose, but they came the closest out of anything; Tony’s good at what he makes.” Bruce turned to the teammate in question. “At least until he decided he was blowing it all up, anyway.”

“That’s not fair—” Tony interrupted, but Bruce kept talking.

“Listen, you know I’m happy for you and everything, but you deleted it  _ all _ and you only even told me about it after the fact.”

Tony lifted a finger. “I did tell you about it, you just fell asleep while I was doing it.”

“You still only told me about it after the fact.” Bruce shook his head. “The suits, I understand, that was getting… yeah. And most of the older weapon stuff was just taking up space, I get that, but this was different. This was something that was there to make the world safer.” He turned back to Steve before Tony could object again and waved his hand. “Well, there you have it, then.”

“There you have a highly one-sided view of it,” Tony muttered. “But sure, there you have it, Cap.”

Steve stared from Tony to Bruce, words piling up in his head that he couldn’t possibly speak all at once. He could feel Tony’s death-glare boring into his forehead, but somehow it was Bruce who he addressed when he finally managed to speak. “Bruce, no one on this team wants you dead.”

Tony threw his hands in the air. “Thank you!” He spun one of the swivel chairs out in front of him and sat down, folding his hands one on top of the other on the table.

“I wasn’t saying I  _ wanted _ those weapons to be used,” Bruce protested. He clearly hadn’t been expecting Steve to take Tony’s side, but still wasn’t giving in. “I just didn’t want to get rid of the option entirely—it’s the Plan B, not the Plan A. And besides, they wouldn’t  _ work _ , not completely, since I can’t die—”

Tony dropped his head onto the table with a muffled  _ thud _ . “You see what I have to deal with?”

Steve frowned. “I think you guys are missing a solution here.” He walked over to the table and pulled out a seat of his own. “I feel like there has to be a gray area between ‘no precautions’ and a… an instant kill.”

Tony lifted his head the slightest bit. “What would you suggest, then, Cap?”

“I don’t know.” Steve shrugged. “I’m not the genius here. But both of you are, and I think that the guy who created Iron Man can find a way to subdue the Hulk.”

He turned to Bruce and added, “Besides the guy who actually does.” He tried to put as much of an apology in his words as he could, and Bruce nodded, seeming to get it.

Tony tapped his fingers up and down on the table. “I did say I was done with suits.” He caught sight of Steve’s and Bruce’s looks and rolled his eyes, sliding his chair over to the side and pulling up one of his holographic screens, where he flicked something open. His grin was visible through the blue light. “But maybe… I can make one exception.”

Steve’s shoulders slumped in relief, and out of his peripheral vision, he could see Bruce doing the same. Slowly, Bruce walked around the side of the table so that he was standing at the shoulder of Tony’s chair, looking at the screen. Whatever was on it was apparently good, because he didn’t argue.

Tony spun his chair around so that he was looking up into Bruce’s face. “Kiss and make up?”

Steve felt his eyebrows lift, but Bruce laughed in spite of himself.

“Maybe wait a few minutes for that.”

Tony’s grin grew wider. “Come on.”

Bruce looked at Tony for a long moment, his face going serious. “Tony—”

“I know, I shouldn’t’ve—”

At the same moment, Bruce started saying, “I might have reacted badly—”

And before either of them could finish their sentences, Tony was standing up from his chair and wrapping his arms around Bruce, who instantly returned the embrace.

Steve propped his chin on his hand as the hug in front of him quickly did become a kiss, with Bruce pulling Tony into him as Tony’s hand reached up to cup the back of his head.

“Um.” Steve didn’t actually know if that was what he said, but he knew he made some kind of noise as he stood up out of his chair and pushed it in. Neither Bruce or Tony gave him any notice, and after a few more seconds, Steve gave up and turned to leave.

As his hand was on the door, ready to shut it behind him—none of the rest of the team was back yet, but he might as well think ahead—a voice that sounded like Bruce’s called out from inside the lab: “Sorry, Cap; we’ll just be a second!”

Tony’s followed a moment later: “There is a possibility for multiple seconds!”

Steve shut the door firmly and started off down the hall again, shaking his head.

_ Natasha owes me ten bucks. _

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
